Drupal Hivemind – when will Drupal 8 be released?

A question Drupal developers worldwide are asking, and one that has naturally occupied us for some time. We developed the competition The Drupal Hivemind, the aim of which is to predict the release date of the new version of the content management system Drupal 8 as accurately as possible and submit it as a tip on drupal8release.com. Drupal 8 Release is now the second project that has been implemented by us based on Drupal 8.

How it works

Registration for participation is via Twitter login or email registration. After placing a tip, it appears as a cloud in a timeline. The larger a cloud, the more people have tipped that date. Twitter users can change their tip at any time after sending a tweet with the hashtag #drupal8release. Depending on the actual release date, prizes include either two tickets for DrupalCon Los Angeles in May 2015 or for DrupalCon Barcelona in autumn 2015.

Headless Drupal 8 and AngularJS

For this project, we embraced a current and widely discussed topic in the web community, the headless architecture of web applications, utilising Drupal 8 and AngularJS. In this approach, the backend is completely decoupled from the frontend and serves only for data management. The great advantage of this approach lies in leveraging the enormous flexibility of both systems and allows for various frontends to be linked to a single backend from which the data is delivered. AngularJS was chosen for the frontend. This was partly due to the perceived popularity of AngularJS, but also because of the availability of easy-to-understand tutorials and examples, as we will release this project later as a proof of concept. Incidentally, more and more options are becoming available to replace the Drupal frontend. The various JavaScript MV* frameworks such as Ember.js, Knockout.js, Angular.js, Backbone.js, or React.js currently play a particularly significant role. During the evaluation of the different options, React.js left a particularly lasting positive impression and will certainly be the subject of future projects.

Through the integration of external components such as Guzzle (HTTP Client) and the provision of the aforementioned modules and APIs, it will be significantly easier to provide or consume web services in Drupal 8 in the future. These developments explain the hype around "Headless Drupal", i.e., the separation between frontend and backend, which we are currently experiencing. A detailed article on this will follow shortly.

The plan is to release the project as a proof of concept before Christmas. The developed modules and the AngularJS frontend will be published on GitHub for this purpose.